In the original TV show Connections, Burke explained the factors that made the Industrial Revolution come about. I don't fully remember the details, but they go something like this:
First off, the wealthy classes in those days would never think of touching with a ten foot pole something as dirty and common as industry, God forbid, not even as administrators. They where the gentlemanly class, game for a spot of hunting, exploration of the colonies, all those so-called noble pursuits of the day, and the year before, and the century before that, etcetera.
And then, in the eighteenth century, a new type of class suddenly burst into the scene, the industrious christians. Led by their pastors, organizing in the anonymity of small towns well away from London, they founded their own schools with (gasp!) chemistry classes, mechanical workshops, etc, all those things considered gauche by the upper crust. By developing technical skills from childhood, the new christian young men were poised to take a hands-on approach to managing the production of goods that were to come out of their shops and factories.
Why did the new christian breed choose to remain in the backwaters of England, instead of moving to London, an ideal hub as well as target market? Because in the backwaters were the fast-flowing rivers that powered the textile mills. Now, water wheels were not terribly effective, but they were the best one could do in the day. It should come as no surprise that James Watt, who perfected the steam engine (which came out of efforts to pump water out of mines) to the point of making it applicable to industry, was one of these new christians, with a protestant work ethic, hard working, frugal and pious, yet curiously oblivious to the morality of exploiting their fellow men, women and children with incredibly long hours in deplorable and dangerous conditions, for very little pay.
Well, when the christian goods began to hit London, then overseas, money started moving about in ways and paths it had never moved in before. Commerce was way up, creating a new affluent class of citizen, which spent it's newfound money buying the latest mass-produced gadgets being churned out, and on the money-go-round went. And so, there was a boom of new, upwardly mobile manifestations of middle class: 1) producers (in the backwaters), 2) traders (who were also...), 3) consumers. And of course, one new manifestation of the lower class.
But let's overlook that annoying last "irritant", shall we?
There was still the major problem of cost, transporting the goods from the backwaters to the big city and the ports. Many of the goods arrived damaged due to the bump and grind of the deplorable roads. But by now, everybody who was anybody wanted to help this gravy train chug along, and what was done was simple and elegant: the british waterways, a network of canals crisscrossing England, where barges with tons of merchandise were towed by horses. Nothing breaking along the way because of bad roads, just a smooth ride on water.
And on it went, outwards and upwards, until the country was also crisscrossed by train tracks. I skipped a few steps, might have gotten some the details wrong, but that's the general idea, or how I understood it, anyway.
I have upgraded my old G3 iMac a few times, and that was complicated...
Complicated as in disassembling the shell, depending on the model, but not complicated as in having to use special equipment, as all you need are a screwdriver (preferably magnetic), maybe a Leatherman toolkit (specifically the pincers), precautions to avoid static electricity, as well as a visual guide: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/.
Going one notch further, when I upgraded the hard disk on my Indigo G3 http://www.faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/imac /imacg3dvhd/, it was a nerve-wracking thought to take apart an additional level of parts, but after the job was done, I was amazed at how simple a procedure it actually was, as well as the fact that it took less than an hour. A month later, a friend asked me to help him upgrade the hard disk on his G3. He was very nervous about it, yet I actually did it in half the time and it was even, you know, fun. As a bonus, for my troubles, I was treated to several mugs of draft beer at a local tavern.
As for RAM chips and the new Macs? I'd guess it takes less than five minutes to do it, just open a little hatch, fit the chip in the slot and you're good to go!
Isn't that just the normal form of democracy in a capitalist nation?
Not quite. During most of the XX century, more often than not, Washington managed to strike a balance between business interests and the interests of society as a whole - think of the cries of corporate outrage when recordable cassettes and VCRs came out, how it supposedly signaled the end of the world as we now it, etc, and how Washington stood its' ground, deeming the technology legal for public consumption.
However, since the advent of the internet, something snapped. Panicking, ignorant fossils (democrats and republicans alike) who think in terms of dump trucks and series of tubes and don't even know how to bookmark a page in their browsers, have now allowed a few major corporate players to determine, one insidious step at a time, how the internet should work and what constitutes fair use and theft, in the exact opposite direction of what used to be the norm.
A corporate iron grip on western culture is almost complete, on paper, on an unprecedented scale. And now, the do-nothing, good-for-nothing distinguished congressman from Nevada is giving us a glimpse of just who owns everything - those who own him. I am convinced that he is completely ignorant on american legal history of intellectual property and ownership.
Even older and of great cultural importance are wax cylinder recordings.
The old wax cylinder players were also recorders, and they were portable, even if quite bulky. At the turn of the century, explorers from the Royal Geographic Society, for example, were logging these devices around the world, recording songs and rituals of many different peoples, from the folk songs of eastern Europe to war and mating rituals of tribes in the south Pacific.
These audio documents catalog communities as they were before western industry, politics, etc, seeped in during the course of the twentieth century. Many of the communities recorded in the wax cylinders have probably lost elements of their heritage, if not outright scattered. Think Hawaii, as an example which I don't mean to trivialize, but I'd rather keep it short and simple: old tribal rituals have now become entertainment pandering to the tourists at luaus or at the airport. How about modern hawaiians (or anybody else, for that matter) hearing their ancestors really going at it, psyching themselves up for the hunt at sea, when it was a do-or-die affair?
Put in another way, I forget who said it (may have been William Burroughs) and I paraphrase: "Once the natives start wearing the t-shirts, that's it, the old magic's gone". And then, there was television... Well, in the wax cylinders, there it is, that old magic.
One final example: in WFMU, the great radio station from New Jersey, there was a show years ago called The Secret Museum Of The Air, and in a program dedicated to gypsy music, they dug out a recording from 1902, a girl in her village singing a capella to her dead brother, asking him to please visit her in her dreams that night. Even through a century of pops, scratches and hiss, as well as the language barrier, it was an un-fucking-believable, mind blowing thing of extreme poignancy and beauty. Compound that with the very real possibility that nobody alive may sing this song anymore, and it just goes to another, eerie level.
This stuff needs to be rescued, restored and preserved.
I used to dislike calamari, but then a chef friend prepared some in his special recipe (ginger, orange, garlic, chili powder, beet, and a few other secret ingredients), and then I realized I'd never had proper calamari before, as this was sensational. I used to dislike beet, too, but in this dish I really enjoyed it, so this guy demolished two barriers of mine in one spectacular stroke. Since then, I've had blind faith in whatever he cooks up.
Then a year later, I tried some fried calamari, spanish style, and once again I was amazed.
Octopus grilled in butter and garlic, with fresh mexican sauce and flour tortillas is really damn good, too.
And yes, you're right about it having to be fresh, as if isn't, it's like chewing on a piece of bleached rubber. So definitely, rule number one: never buy frozen squid or octopus.
1. Pluto had been captured on plate as far back as 1915 by another astronomer, and it was he that missed it, not Tombaugh. So if they had known what they were looking at back then, the search would have been shortened by a decade and a half. 2. Tombaugh kept on searching for other candidates for Planet X after discovering Pluto.
An interesting tidbit is that during the 1930's, the only 24 hour radio station whose signal reached Flagstaff transmitted from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, so that on those long Arizona nights, Tombaugh's trusty companion was mexican ranchero music. After a while, he had become quite a fan and authority on it. Ah yes, ranchero music and the far reaches of the solar system, a combination made for each other.
Apologies for my fuzzy memory getting the wires crossed.
If they manage to standarize a century of these plates, it would significantly extend the time range of data to digitally extrapolate and detect objects previously missed. Just to speak of mapping our own cosmic backyard, a significant amount of slow moving, previously undetected Kuiper Belt Objects, for example, would more easily pop into view. Surely a bunch of comets, too.
Clyde Tombaugh captured Pluto several times during his three decades long hunt for the elusive Planet X, but failed to put the pieces together. If he had had digital technology, he would have shaved off at least a decade of effort. So imagine all the extremely useful raw data still stored in those plates.
Got it, it wasn't the Stones themselves. Thanks, I really needed to know that.
Is the old manager getting the royalties, BTW, Andrew Loog Oldham? It sounds like something he would do, as the guy fomented some serious backstabbing among the Stones, during the days of Brian Jones. For example, at the same time he was marginalizing Brian in favour of Mick and Keith's compositions, he was also paying a higher salary to Brian, unknown to the rest of the band. And Brian was in on the fix.
Not a very ethical man, to say the least. A vampire actually, feeding and thriving on disharmony.
I was in the gym the other day, and the "Discovery Channel" had a show on about Mexican UFO sightings. Apparently, Mexico is the hot new location for "UFOlogists".
He used to be a serious reporter (an anchorman for the mexican 60 Minutes), but in the last decade or two he's made a mint holding conferences all over Mexico about the grays and illuminati and all sorts of rubbishy things. Whenever he's on television (which is often), his appearances sound like paid advertisements for his conferences. And I know people who attend and believe, too.
Last I heard (a few years ago), he was saying that an alien bracelet had come into his possession, with the line that top scientists had analyzed the artifact and were baffled by its' properties. Of course, these are scientists neither you or I have ever heard of, and ditto for the lab that supposedly performed the tests. If he even gave any names, which I'm not sure about.
Itself a blatant ripoff of Stevie Wonder's "Pasttime Paradise", from "Songs In The Key Of Life". If anybody, Weird Al should have gotten permission from Stevie. Is Coolio so deluded as to think that this work actually belongs to him? Talk about pretzel logic! Oh well, nothing makes sense anymore.
1. Many of the people you refer to as Mexicans are actually from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, etc. Washington policy has always wanted latino labor to be a cheap, exploitable commodity. US corporations have always seen Latin America as their rightful property, toxic dump and political/military playground. The influx of latin immigrants (whether they come from Central or South America, northern Mexico is the portal to the USA) is just another example of selfish and shortsighted Washington policy coming back home to roost.
2. It's a two way street. Do you have any idea just how many gringos live in Mexico? Quite a lot. In fact, many more than you might imagine. Just check out most of Baja, San Miguel De Allende, Cuernavaca, Merida, etc. And it's not just Mexico, of course, gringos are everywhere. From the OP: What is it there in the USA that people, even some Britons (I live in Britain today) want to live there?? While it's true that some people from all over the world may want to live in the USA, let's not ignore the fact that a large number of USA citizens have had it up to here and bailed ship already.
Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beta Band, The Turin Brakes, The Beatles, The Doves...
You forgot to mention the most insidious example, the Rolling Stones. This band made their career by blatantly ripping off artists such as Robert Johnson, then dispatched a fleet of lawyers when a string arrangement from one of their songs was sampled by The Verve, for the song "Bittersweet Symphony". I can picture these asshats in one of their castles or manors in the english countryside, with Richards suddenly going "Look, Mick! They're playing our song!", then Jagger stroking his chin while musing out loud "I bet we could make some money off of that".
Some musicians over time have been amused and flattered by younger generations sampling their riffs (think James Brown and the hip-hop culture), while bands like the Stones, in spectacular displays of cynicism, went along with these lawsuits, helping to create this slippery slope that, from the looks of it, is reaching absurd proportions.
I mean, think Disney and all the billions they've made exploiting intellectual works that pre-date copyright and trademark laws (the Grimm Brothers, Arabian Nights, Greek Mythology, etc), all the while lobbying Congress for trademark extensions, overlording Mickey Mouse with an iron fist, stifling the idea of Free Culture (Free as in Speech). This is a seriously cynical stance, and the horrifying thing is, the laws are on their side, cause they've got the money to change them to their benefit.
As a final trivia tidbit, I remember how in the mid-eighties, Huey Lewis And The News (aaaack!) took Ray Parker Jr (aaaack!) to court for "stealing" the riff from "I Want A New Drug" for the "Ghostbusters" theme song, all the while neglecting to mention that they, in turn, had stolen the riff from somebody else (I forget who, as these songs are pretty much disposable pop, if you know what I mean...).
Which brings up a point: The Pyramids of Giza are part of the old list, Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World, the only one still standing. Were the pyramids eliminated from the candidates list because they are already part of the old list?
I don't get it, I really don't.
Yet another point is that none of the finalists have practical usage in the modern world. How about something with real bang for the buck, such as: The Panama Canal The Chunnel The Hubble Space Telescope, and even more specifically, the Deep Field images (this one gets my vote) The Mars Rovers (and the method by which they were delivered to the martian surface) The Voyager space probes, right now the farthest man-made objects from Earth
Hell, there's dozens of worthy candidates which were probably not considered.
What is the origin of bullying in a young, growing human being? I can think of four reasons:
1. Parental lack of confrontation (as in fearful parents creating no boundaries for the child - anything goes). 2. Parental neglect (again, no boundaries for the child, but there's abandonment issues here). 3. Parental or fraternal abuse. 4. Schoolyard or neighborhood abuse of third parties by victims of the first three.
Please notice how 2, 3 and 4 are expressions of redirected anger. Also notice how 1, 2 and 3 come from the home.
Oh, as for the title of this sub-thread, Why the hell is this such a big deal?: Ever notice just how fucked-up this world is? From what environment did these adults who fuck up the world come? It's a self-perpetuating problem of devastating proportions, which will only get worse before it gets better, if at all.
In Sim City the only reason anyone every built arcologies was because they had tons of cash and all the other land was taken up because they are really expensive (or just because they were cool).
Also, to reach the awe inspiring end of the game...
Holy cow, this thing can achieve Earth orbit! So why focus just on the Sydney-London thing (or to use that ol' "New Orient Express" analogy, New York-Honk Kong) instead of cheap space travel?
Most of it, but not all. The resolution is not high enough to show matter escaping into space. Keep in mind that Jupiter's ring is made of, and is replenished by, Io's volcanic ejecta.
Someone further up the thread said this event was created by something more similar to a geyser than a volcano. Imagine standing on the surface of Io, as you would on Yellowstone, watching this baby from, let's say, half a kilometer. A stream shooting into space and arching in filaments in all directions beyond the horizon, with Jupiter looming in the skies. JPL needs to put an artist's rendition on the website.
Damn right. A month with OSX is not enough to find all the apps you need to get everything you want done. And of course, not all needs manifest themselves at the same time, so it's not like you have to spend several months of consecutive all-nighters just looking for apps. There's about 30 apps that I use on a regular basis. Once I got those covered, I've only had to look for three or four apps in the course of the last year, one absolutely essential (iWeb Enhancer), which I paid something like $20 for, another a game that I read about here on/. that looked like tons of fun (Sketchfigher 3000), and the others just for one or two-time tweaks, so that the trial versions suited me just fine.
30 Days With XYZ, while an interesting gimmick that makes for a fun read, is severely limited by its' own nature, so that there's a superficiality in the polemic created by it.
What I'm saying is, there's an equilibrium point, and for any OS, Day 30 is obviously not it.
After remembering a bit more about it, I'll correct a crucial mistake in my post:
WBUR promised Guth the ultimate free lunch.
There, now that's much better.
You see, when Guth started to attract media attention back in the mid-eighties, he was already displaying a penchant for nice and quick soundbites to get his point across. The man said that with 28 pounds of matter at just the right conditions (density and temperature), you could create a Big Bang that would open a rift in our universe, eject itself into it, seal the rift behind itself (all under Plack Time, I would assume) and go about its' post-Big Bang business, creation of matter through inflationary supercooling and that sort of thing, parallel and completely disconnected from us.
In fact, Guth said at the time, the universe may be "the ultimate free lunch".
All right, then, now that we've cleared this up, back to your regularly scheduled thread...
On October 10, 2006, Iraqi insurgents launched a nighttime attack on Forward Base Falcon, basically the largest US ammo storage facility in all of Iraq.
CNN reported the attack as breaking news, then after a quick official statement that there were no casualties, all information on it disappeared the following day, never to return. Not a single mainstream news source reported a follow-up on the event. Afterwards, even liberal talk radio hosts would mutter and evade the question by an occasional caller and quickly move on to something else, almost as if they were warned that if they talked about it, their ass was toast.
There are a couple of videos out there, one by Al-Jazeera and at least two by US soldiers with camcorders, all of them showing the same thing: a series of explosions, punctuated by a gigantic mushroom cloud explosion that lit up Baghdad like it was daytime. Here's a YouTube link to one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1ZvWJXoWXM
Some speculative estimates say that 300+ US soldiers died in the attack. At least, a large fortune in weaponry was blown to bits. Isn't it strange that the story was completely blacked out from the mainstream media so that the electorate did not get a chance to see this just prior to the US elections? And how nobody has said a peep about it since then?
I'd consider this as 2007 censorship, since the silence continues, so that it's no longer just a story about the attack, but of the news blackout. Nobody's asking questions nor making comments, not even to disprove catastrophic losses. It's as if the attack was officially erased from recent history, except for a bit of rogue evidence making the rounds in obscure corners of the internet. Now this is censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
In the original TV show Connections, Burke explained the factors that made the Industrial Revolution come about. I don't fully remember the details, but they go something like this:
First off, the wealthy classes in those days would never think of touching with a ten foot pole something as dirty and common as industry, God forbid, not even as administrators. They where the gentlemanly class, game for a spot of hunting, exploration of the colonies, all those so-called noble pursuits of the day, and the year before, and the century before that, etcetera.
And then, in the eighteenth century, a new type of class suddenly burst into the scene, the industrious christians. Led by their pastors, organizing in the anonymity of small towns well away from London, they founded their own schools with (gasp!) chemistry classes, mechanical workshops, etc, all those things considered gauche by the upper crust. By developing technical skills from childhood, the new christian young men were poised to take a hands-on approach to managing the production of goods that were to come out of their shops and factories.
Why did the new christian breed choose to remain in the backwaters of England, instead of moving to London, an ideal hub as well as target market? Because in the backwaters were the fast-flowing rivers that powered the textile mills. Now, water wheels were not terribly effective, but they were the best one could do in the day. It should come as no surprise that James Watt, who perfected the steam engine (which came out of efforts to pump water out of mines) to the point of making it applicable to industry, was one of these new christians, with a protestant work ethic, hard working, frugal and pious, yet curiously oblivious to the morality of exploiting their fellow men, women and children with incredibly long hours in deplorable and dangerous conditions, for very little pay.
Well, when the christian goods began to hit London, then overseas, money started moving about in ways and paths it had never moved in before. Commerce was way up, creating a new affluent class of citizen, which spent it's newfound money buying the latest mass-produced gadgets being churned out, and on the money-go-round went. And so, there was a boom of new, upwardly mobile manifestations of middle class: 1) producers (in the backwaters), 2) traders (who were also...), 3) consumers. And of course, one new manifestation of the lower class.
But let's overlook that annoying last "irritant", shall we?
There was still the major problem of cost, transporting the goods from the backwaters to the big city and the ports. Many of the goods arrived damaged due to the bump and grind of the deplorable roads. But by now, everybody who was anybody wanted to help this gravy train chug along, and what was done was simple and elegant: the british waterways, a network of canals crisscrossing England, where barges with tons of merchandise were towed by horses. Nothing breaking along the way because of bad roads, just a smooth ride on water.
And on it went, outwards and upwards, until the country was also crisscrossed by train tracks.
I skipped a few steps, might have gotten some the details wrong, but that's the general idea, or how I understood it, anyway.
I have upgraded my old G3 iMac a few times, and that was complicated...
c /imacg3dvhd/, it was a nerve-wracking thought to take apart an additional level of parts, but after the job was done, I was amazed at how simple a procedure it actually was, as well as the fact that it took less than an hour. A month later, a friend asked me to help him upgrade the hard disk on his G3. He was very nervous about it, yet I actually did it in half the time and it was even, you know, fun. As a bonus, for my troubles, I was treated to several mugs of draft beer at a local tavern.
Complicated as in disassembling the shell, depending on the model, but not complicated as in having to use special equipment, as all you need are a screwdriver (preferably magnetic), maybe a Leatherman toolkit (specifically the pincers), precautions to avoid static electricity, as well as a visual guide: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/.
Going one notch further, when I upgraded the hard disk on my Indigo G3 http://www.faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/ima
As for RAM chips and the new Macs? I'd guess it takes less than five minutes to do it, just open a little hatch, fit the chip in the slot and you're good to go!
Bah. The Spice Girls were little more than a female, post-Madonna version of Menudo.
Holy shit! A reference to Menudo on Slashdot! Who ordered that?
Isn't that just the normal form of democracy in a capitalist nation?
Not quite. During most of the XX century, more often than not, Washington managed to strike a balance between business interests and the interests of society as a whole - think of the cries of corporate outrage when recordable cassettes and VCRs came out, how it supposedly signaled the end of the world as we now it, etc, and how Washington stood its' ground, deeming the technology legal for public consumption.
However, since the advent of the internet, something snapped. Panicking, ignorant fossils (democrats and republicans alike) who think in terms of dump trucks and series of tubes and don't even know how to bookmark a page in their browsers, have now allowed a few major corporate players to determine, one insidious step at a time, how the internet should work and what constitutes fair use and theft, in the exact opposite direction of what used to be the norm.
A corporate iron grip on western culture is almost complete, on paper, on an unprecedented scale. And now, the do-nothing, good-for-nothing distinguished congressman from Nevada is giving us a glimpse of just who owns everything - those who own him. I am convinced that he is completely ignorant on american legal history of intellectual property and ownership.
Even older and of great cultural importance are wax cylinder recordings.
The old wax cylinder players were also recorders, and they were portable, even if quite bulky. At the turn of the century, explorers from the Royal Geographic Society, for example, were logging these devices around the world, recording songs and rituals of many different peoples, from the folk songs of eastern Europe to war and mating rituals of tribes in the south Pacific.
These audio documents catalog communities as they were before western industry, politics, etc, seeped in during the course of the twentieth century. Many of the communities recorded in the wax cylinders have probably lost elements of their heritage, if not outright scattered. Think Hawaii, as an example which I don't mean to trivialize, but I'd rather keep it short and simple: old tribal rituals have now become entertainment pandering to the tourists at luaus or at the airport. How about modern hawaiians (or anybody else, for that matter) hearing their ancestors really going at it, psyching themselves up for the hunt at sea, when it was a do-or-die affair?
Put in another way, I forget who said it (may have been William Burroughs) and I paraphrase: "Once the natives start wearing the t-shirts, that's it, the old magic's gone". And then, there was television... Well, in the wax cylinders, there it is, that old magic.
One final example: in WFMU, the great radio station from New Jersey, there was a show years ago called The Secret Museum Of The Air, and in a program dedicated to gypsy music, they dug out a recording from 1902, a girl in her village singing a capella to her dead brother, asking him to please visit her in her dreams that night. Even through a century of pops, scratches and hiss, as well as the language barrier, it was an un-fucking-believable, mind blowing thing of extreme poignancy and beauty. Compound that with the very real possibility that nobody alive may sing this song anymore, and it just goes to another, eerie level.
This stuff needs to be rescued, restored and preserved.
I used to dislike calamari, but then a chef friend prepared some in his special recipe (ginger, orange, garlic, chili powder, beet, and a few other secret ingredients), and then I realized I'd never had proper calamari before, as this was sensational. I used to dislike beet, too, but in this dish I really enjoyed it, so this guy demolished two barriers of mine in one spectacular stroke. Since then, I've had blind faith in whatever he cooks up.
Then a year later, I tried some fried calamari, spanish style, and once again I was amazed.
Octopus grilled in butter and garlic, with fresh mexican sauce and flour tortillas is really damn good, too.
And yes, you're right about it having to be fresh, as if isn't, it's like chewing on a piece of bleached rubber.
So definitely, rule number one: never buy frozen squid or octopus.
Right! Let me set the record straight:
1. Pluto had been captured on plate as far back as 1915 by another astronomer, and it was he that missed it, not Tombaugh. So if they had known what they were looking at back then, the search would have been shortened by a decade and a half.
2. Tombaugh kept on searching for other candidates for Planet X after discovering Pluto.
An interesting tidbit is that during the 1930's, the only 24 hour radio station whose signal reached Flagstaff transmitted from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, so that on those long Arizona nights, Tombaugh's trusty companion was mexican ranchero music. After a while, he had become quite a fan and authority on it. Ah yes, ranchero music and the far reaches of the solar system, a combination made for each other.
Apologies for my fuzzy memory getting the wires crossed.
If they manage to standarize a century of these plates, it would significantly extend the time range of data to digitally extrapolate and detect objects previously missed. Just to speak of mapping our own cosmic backyard, a significant amount of slow moving, previously undetected Kuiper Belt Objects, for example, would more easily pop into view. Surely a bunch of comets, too.
Clyde Tombaugh captured Pluto several times during his three decades long hunt for the elusive Planet X, but failed to put the pieces together. If he had had digital technology, he would have shaved off at least a decade of effort. So imagine all the extremely useful raw data still stored in those plates.
Got it, it wasn't the Stones themselves. Thanks, I really needed to know that.
Is the old manager getting the royalties, BTW, Andrew Loog Oldham? It sounds like something he would do, as the guy fomented some serious backstabbing among the Stones, during the days of Brian Jones. For example, at the same time he was marginalizing Brian in favour of Mick and Keith's compositions, he was also paying a higher salary to Brian, unknown to the rest of the band. And Brian was in on the fix.
Not a very ethical man, to say the least. A vampire actually, feeding and thriving on disharmony.
I was in the gym the other day, and the "Discovery Channel" had a show on about Mexican UFO sightings. Apparently, Mexico is the hot new location for "UFOlogists".
It's this guy's fault: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Maussan
He used to be a serious reporter (an anchorman for the mexican 60 Minutes), but in the last decade or two he's made a mint holding conferences all over Mexico about the grays and illuminati and all sorts of rubbishy things. Whenever he's on television (which is often), his appearances sound like paid advertisements for his conferences. And I know people who attend and believe, too.
Last I heard (a few years ago), he was saying that an alien bracelet had come into his possession, with the line that top scientists had analyzed the artifact and were baffled by its' properties. Of course, these are scientists neither you or I have ever heard of, and ditto for the lab that supposedly performed the tests. If he even gave any names, which I'm not sure about.
Coolio's "Gangsta Paradise"
Itself a blatant ripoff of Stevie Wonder's "Pasttime Paradise", from "Songs In The Key Of Life". If anybody, Weird Al should have gotten permission from Stevie. Is Coolio so deluded as to think that this work actually belongs to him? Talk about pretzel logic! Oh well, nothing makes sense anymore.
I don't know. Ask the Mexicans.
Two points:
1. Many of the people you refer to as Mexicans are actually from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, etc. Washington policy has always wanted latino labor to be a cheap, exploitable commodity. US corporations have always seen Latin America as their rightful property, toxic dump and political/military playground. The influx of latin immigrants (whether they come from Central or South America, northern Mexico is the portal to the USA) is just another example of selfish and shortsighted Washington policy coming back home to roost.
2. It's a two way street. Do you have any idea just how many gringos live in Mexico? Quite a lot. In fact, many more than you might imagine. Just check out most of Baja, San Miguel De Allende, Cuernavaca, Merida, etc. And it's not just Mexico, of course, gringos are everywhere.
From the OP: What is it there in the USA that people, even some Britons (I live in Britain today) want to live there??
While it's true that some people from all over the world may want to live in the USA, let's not ignore the fact that a large number of USA citizens have had it up to here and bailed ship already.
Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beta Band, The Turin Brakes, The Beatles, The Doves...
You forgot to mention the most insidious example, the Rolling Stones. This band made their career by blatantly ripping off artists such as Robert Johnson, then dispatched a fleet of lawyers when a string arrangement from one of their songs was sampled by The Verve, for the song "Bittersweet Symphony".
I can picture these asshats in one of their castles or manors in the english countryside, with Richards suddenly going "Look, Mick! They're playing our song!", then Jagger stroking his chin while musing out loud "I bet we could make some money off of that".
Some musicians over time have been amused and flattered by younger generations sampling their riffs (think James Brown and the hip-hop culture), while bands like the Stones, in spectacular displays of cynicism, went along with these lawsuits, helping to create this slippery slope that, from the looks of it, is reaching absurd proportions.
I mean, think Disney and all the billions they've made exploiting intellectual works that pre-date copyright and trademark laws (the Grimm Brothers, Arabian Nights, Greek Mythology, etc), all the while lobbying Congress for trademark extensions, overlording Mickey Mouse with an iron fist, stifling the idea of Free Culture (Free as in Speech). This is a seriously cynical stance, and the horrifying thing is, the laws are on their side, cause they've got the money to change them to their benefit.
As a final trivia tidbit, I remember how in the mid-eighties, Huey Lewis And The News (aaaack!) took Ray Parker Jr (aaaack!) to court for "stealing" the riff from "I Want A New Drug" for the "Ghostbusters" theme song, all the while neglecting to mention that they, in turn, had stolen the riff from somebody else (I forget who, as these songs are pretty much disposable pop, if you know what I mean...).
Which brings up a point: The Pyramids of Giza are part of the old list, Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World, the only one still standing. Were the pyramids eliminated from the candidates list because they are already part of the old list?
I don't get it, I really don't.
Yet another point is that none of the finalists have practical usage in the modern world. How about something with real bang for the buck, such as:
The Panama Canal
The Chunnel
The Hubble Space Telescope, and even more specifically, the Deep Field images (this one gets my vote)
The Mars Rovers (and the method by which they were delivered to the martian surface)
The Voyager space probes, right now the farthest man-made objects from Earth
Hell, there's dozens of worthy candidates which were probably not considered.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of old guys with Tourette's Syndrome yelling HTML code into a tin can on a string!
What is the origin of bullying in a young, growing human being? I can think of four reasons:
1. Parental lack of confrontation (as in fearful parents creating no boundaries for the child - anything goes).
2. Parental neglect (again, no boundaries for the child, but there's abandonment issues here).
3. Parental or fraternal abuse.
4. Schoolyard or neighborhood abuse of third parties by victims of the first three.
Please notice how 2, 3 and 4 are expressions of redirected anger. Also notice how 1, 2 and 3 come from the home.
Oh, as for the title of this sub-thread, Why the hell is this such a big deal?: Ever notice just how fucked-up this world is? From what environment did these adults who fuck up the world come? It's a self-perpetuating problem of devastating proportions, which will only get worse before it gets better, if at all.
In Sim City the only reason anyone every built arcologies was because they had tons of cash and all the other land was taken up because they are really expensive (or just because they were cool).
Also, to reach the awe inspiring end of the game...
It'd be *expensive* to build (and keep up) such custom, fragile, and constraint-ridden structures in high-rent NYC.
Transparent aluminum?
GV Corporation, company motto: "Where ideas can hang out, and do whatever!"
Led by Grass Valley Greg, the man who invented the Delete Button, and whose mantra is "Work is play, tofutti time today!"
Sadly, the company went belly up after Greg spent millions and millions of dollars in a campaign to legalize tomatoes.
Holy cow, this thing can achieve Earth orbit! So why focus just on the Sydney-London thing (or to use that ol' "New Orient Express" analogy, New York-Honk Kong) instead of cheap space travel?
It looks to me like it's falling back down.
Most of it, but not all. The resolution is not high enough to show matter escaping into space.
Keep in mind that Jupiter's ring is made of, and is replenished by, Io's volcanic ejecta.
Someone further up the thread said this event was created by something more similar to a geyser than a volcano. Imagine standing on the surface of Io, as you would on Yellowstone, watching this baby from, let's say, half a kilometer. A stream shooting into space and arching in filaments in all directions beyond the horizon, with Jupiter looming in the skies. JPL needs to put an artist's rendition on the website.
Damn right. /. that looked like tons of fun (Sketchfigher 3000), and the others just for one or two-time tweaks, so that the trial versions suited me just fine.
A month with OSX is not enough to find all the apps you need to get everything you want done. And of course, not all needs manifest themselves at the same time, so it's not like you have to spend several months of consecutive all-nighters just looking for apps.
There's about 30 apps that I use on a regular basis. Once I got those covered, I've only had to look for three or four apps in the course of the last year, one absolutely essential (iWeb Enhancer), which I paid something like $20 for, another a game that I read about here on
30 Days With XYZ, while an interesting gimmick that makes for a fun read, is severely limited by its' own nature, so that there's a superficiality in the polemic created by it.
What I'm saying is, there's an equilibrium point, and for any OS, Day 30 is obviously not it.
After remembering a bit more about it, I'll correct a crucial mistake in my post:
WBUR promised Guth the ultimate free lunch.
There, now that's much better.
You see, when Guth started to attract media attention back in the mid-eighties, he was already displaying a penchant for nice and quick soundbites to get his point across. The man said that with 28 pounds of matter at just the right conditions (density and temperature), you could create a Big Bang that would open a rift in our universe, eject itself into it, seal the rift behind itself (all under Plack Time, I would assume) and go about its' post-Big Bang business, creation of matter through inflationary supercooling and that sort of thing, parallel and completely disconnected from us.
In fact, Guth said at the time, the universe may be "the ultimate free lunch".
All right, then, now that we've cleared this up, back to your regularly scheduled thread...
Why did Alan Guth opt to appear on the show?
WBUR promised him a free lunch.
On October 10, 2006, Iraqi insurgents launched a nighttime attack on Forward Base Falcon, basically the largest US ammo storage facility in all of Iraq.
2 forward+base+falcon%22&btnG=Google+Search
CNN reported the attack as breaking news, then after a quick official statement that there were no casualties, all information on it disappeared the following day, never to return. Not a single mainstream news source reported a follow-up on the event. Afterwards, even liberal talk radio hosts would mutter and evade the question by an occasional caller and quickly move on to something else, almost as if they were warned that if they talked about it, their ass was toast.
Look it up on Google, there's plenty of blogs with bits and pieces of the story, along with tons of speculation:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=%2
There are a couple of videos out there, one by Al-Jazeera and at least two by US soldiers with camcorders, all of them showing the same thing: a series of explosions, punctuated by a gigantic mushroom cloud explosion that lit up Baghdad like it was daytime.
Here's a YouTube link to one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1ZvWJXoWXM
Some speculative estimates say that 300+ US soldiers died in the attack. At least, a large fortune in weaponry was blown to bits. Isn't it strange that the story was completely blacked out from the mainstream media so that the electorate did not get a chance to see this just prior to the US elections? And how nobody has said a peep about it since then?
I'd consider this as 2007 censorship, since the silence continues, so that it's no longer just a story about the attack, but of the news blackout. Nobody's asking questions nor making comments, not even to disprove catastrophic losses. It's as if the attack was officially erased from recent history, except for a bit of rogue evidence making the rounds in obscure corners of the internet. Now this is censorship.